EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced EMC ® DSSD™ D5™, a quantum leap in flash storage. Available in March, DSSD D5 is the first of a new category of flash storage – Rack-Scale Flash. DSSD D5 is a completely new architecture designed for the most data-intensive applications, both traditional and next-generation, which require extreme levels of performance and the lowest possible latency. DSSD D5 reaches new performance heights, with real-world results that speed applications such as genetic sequencing calculations, fraud detection, credit card authorization, and advanced analytics by as much as 10X.

Enterprises at the cutting edge demand high-performance infrastructure to leverage data growth, data velocity and variety for business needs. These organizations require shared enterprise-ready flash storage with the highest levels of performance, throughput and almost nonexistent latency. Latency that in the past was only attained through direct-attached PCIe flash cards with major drawbacks in price, scale, expandability, serviceability, availability, and shareability – with every PCIe card an individually managed and non-redundant island of storage.

DSSD D5 delivers ultra-dense, high-performance, highly available and very low latency shared flash storage for up to 48 redundant connected servers. D5 is connected to each node through PCIe Gen3 and leverages NVMe technology, to deliver the performance of PCI-attached flash. D5 is a standalone appliance that is disaggregated from compute, delivering the benefits of shared storage. The result is next-generation performance with latency as low as 100 microseconds, throughput as high as 100 GB/s, and IOPS of up to 10 million in a 5U system.

The ultra-high performance D5 was developed from the ground up and packaged with multiple industry-first hardware and software innovations that set it apart from any other storage offering available on the market. DSSD D5 moves beyond storage into the realm of enabling next-generation applications that require extreme performance and scalability. Designed to meet the demands of the high-performance, data-intensive workloads of tomorrow, D5 also delivers a crucial link to emerging next-generation applications based on extremely large, fast-growing working sets with 100 percent hot and active data.

DSSD D5 reduces data center footprint and costs with ultra-dense, shared flash. The appliance provides up to 36 flash modules with 144TB RAW (100TB usable) capacity, in a five rack-unit chassis that can be accessed redundantly by up to 48 direct-attached servers. D5 is also engineered to provide increased application uptime through enterprise-class availability and serviceability features. These features include dual-ported client cards, dual H/A controllers, redundant components and industry-leading flash reliability and resiliency with Cubic RAID™, dynamic wear leveling, flash physics control and space-time garbage collection.

Proven Use Cases

EMC offers DSSD D5 to benefit industries currently limited by traditional architectures that were not designed for the extreme performance needs of their business critical applications. These include applications built on top of Hadoop, high performance databases and data warehouses as well as custom applications used for complex, real-time data processing and real-time analytics and insight.

DSSD D5 accelerates current databases and data warehouse solutions, such as Oracle, through an innovative low-latency data path to deliver 3X lower latency, one-fifth the rack space and 68% lower TCO than the highest published performance Oracle solution. With DSSD D5, customers can consolidate multiple applications onto a single storage platform, and simplify data warehouses by eliminating multiple copies of data, complex indexing, intricate partitioning, and the need for materialized views.

For Hadoop workloads, DSSD D5 significantly accelerates operational analytics compared to traditional DAS infrastructure. Also, customers can independently scale compute and storage, capturing maximum return from their flash investment by writing only one copy of data on flash, irrespective of replication factor set in HDFS.

DSSD D5 is creating a new category of flash storage, Rack-Scale Flash, and there's more to come. EMC's Converged Platforms Division (VCE ® ), will incorporate DSSD D5 into its VCE converged infrastructure portfolio in the near future.

Availability

EMC Customer Quotes

Brian Dougherty, Chief Technical Architect, CMA“We're running some of the most complex workloads in the world, but traditional flash couldn't offer the performance or bandwidth we wanted to service our applications or analyze our data in real time. DSSD D5 has fundamentally changed our business by eliminating unnecessary software, hardware and pre-processed batch jobs. With DSSD, we're able to support applications and analytics at never-before-seen speeds; this is what enabled us to make the leap to this new generation of flash storage, and we're not looking back.”

Gary Grider, High Performance Computing Division Leader, Los Alamos National Laboratory“We have been testing the DSSD D5 technology for several months with multiple workloads: file systems, NOSQL DBs and the DSSD direct API. The unique shared high bandwidth PCI connectivity, the low latency, and the very high read bandwidth achieved are impressive in such a small footprint.”

EMC Partner Quotes

Mike Olson, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudera“DSSD was built for Big Data. The joint engineering solution from Cloudera and EMC provides an HDFS plug-in to accelerate applications and tools using DSSD and Cloudera. EMC is a key strategic partner for us, and the two companies worked hand-in-hand to bring this joint offering to market. Cloudera has tested the DSSD D5 appliance in our lab, and we've seen an order of magnitude increase in performance. It's the fastest HBase cluster we've ever tested.”

Bob Olwig, VP of Business Strategy & Marketing, World Wide Technology, Inc.“WWT has been an early DSSD partner and tested and validated the D5, and we've demonstrated the performance and TCO benefits of rack-scale flash to our joint customers. Increasingly, customers are looking to WWT for innovations that solve challenging business problems, particularly in the areas of Big Data and high performance enterprise analytics. DSSD's D5 storage product is screaming fast and we see immediate benefits the D5 can bring to IT environments within our Financial Services, Technology/Telco and Federal verticals.”

Industry Analyst Quote

Eric Burgener, Research Director for Storage Practice, IDC“As companies come to better understand the value that real-time analytics offers in terms of identifying new prospects and new market opportunities, lead generation, and customer retention, the evolving big data segment will increasingly penetrate mainstream computing. This changes the scale, both in terms of performance and capacity, at which IT infrastructure must operate going forward, demanding significant changes in storage architectures. DSSD identified this opportunity early on and is introducing a new category of enterprise storage, called ‘Rack-Scale Flash', with key features that define this new category, including a completely flash-optimized design, direct memory attachment for networked storage, a much lighter weight I/O stack that breaks latency and throughput barriers, and the separation of control and data planes.”

EMC Executive Quote:

CJ Desai, President Emerging Technologies Division, EMC Corporation“EMC acquired DSSD in 2014 because we recognized its game-changing innovation. Today, we're bringing a hardened, tested platform to market, changing the face of flash as we know it and rounding out EMC's already-robust flash portfolio. DSSD is a blazing fast, high-performance solution and customers are in for a magnitude improvement in what's now possible for demanding applications in this new era of Rack-Scale Flash.”

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

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This release contains “forward-looking statements” as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) risks associated with the proposed acquisition of EMC by Denali Holdings, Inc., the parent company of Dell, Inc., including, among others, assumptions related to the ability to close the acquisition, the expected closing date and its anticipated costs and benefits; (ii) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (iii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iv) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (v) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (vi) component and product quality and availability; (vii) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (viii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (ix) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (x) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xi) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xii) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xiii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiv) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xvi) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.